Perhaps you’ve heard there’s a way to tell people what to do in your copy without setting off any red flags in their mind.

You may have noticed that many marketing pieces these days contain the words, “by now.” While that’s the most elementry attempt at doing it, in some cases it’s effective.

Are you wondering what “it” is?

“It” is called an embedded command. You can essentially go place a command inside your normal conversational message so that it doesn’t stand out to your reader.

Spoken out loud, “by now” sounds like “buy now.” My understanding is there’s currently only one book on copywriting that talks about embedded commands. “By now” is the example given.

Hopefully it doesn’t come as any big surprise that for embedded commands to be effective, they actually have to be embedded. Starting a paragraph with “by now” isn’t very embedded. There’s a chance it could work for your market. The only way to tell is to try it.

In writing, you’ll want to be much more sneaky about it. If you go for intermediate steps in addition to consummating the sale, you’ll get more mileage out of it.

If you noticed, I used a couple of examples to get your imagination going. I put them in bold font so you can go back and look if you missed them.